The Performance and Wind Tunnel Test of Aerofoils for Small Wind Turbine Generating Systems

Abstract

The small scale wind turbines have been used as the stand alone power source for years. Particularly these days, there is an increasing demand for the small wind turbines, of the output below 1kW, as monuments and educational materials. It is recommended that wind turbines of a diameter under 1.0m must be the low blade tip speed ratio type, owing to problems of both safety and blade noise. In these circumstances, it would be necessary to develop the system characteristics of the micro wind turbines for the purpose of much higher performance in spite of having the low Reynolds number regions.
Therefore, in this work, in order to clarify the optimum aerofoil cross section for the micro wind turbine, we carried out a wind tunnel test of the two dimensional aerofoils in the low Reynolds number regions. Furthermore, we conducted the calculation of the turbine's performance based on the result of this wind tunnel tests.
The model blades are manufactured with the blade chord of 0.15m, the blade span of 0.6m, and the maximum thickness of aerofoil cross sections from 8% to 32%. The experimental Reynolds number is around 150, 000.
From this work, we have clarified the performance of the aerofoil cross sections in the low Reynolds number regions. Our work further proves that the turbine outputs were strongly influenced by the performance of the aerofoil cross section.